I've always been a bit puzzled by the way so many car makers applied the "custom" moniker to their plainest models. To me, "custom" would seem to indicate something unique and custom-made. The wannabe marketing expert in me suspects that the idea was to lend a little panache to the lower-rank cars in the car makers' model lines: "Yeah, it's the lowest-priced one they have, but hey -- it's a Custom!" ;)

Funny enough, looking at this Snowshoe White and Sherwood Green '57 Ford Custom 300, I'm hard put to think of it as a plain car. Okay, so it's a fairly pedestrian two-door sedan and not a sexy convertible or hardtop, and it's refreshingly bereft of the add-on accessories that can make some of it's fancier contemporaries look gaudy and overburdened. Indeed, I thought the lack of extraneous bolt-on doodads lent this car a certain, clean elegance. The sharp green-and-white colour scheme and the bold chrome grille and bumpers give it all the flash it really needs.

This car's owner is an enthusiastic local collector who I've known forever. He has the cool conceit of finding an original Nova Scotia license plate that matches the year of the car's manufacture. Not only is it a neat way of identifying the car's vintage ( the first question every antique car owner hears from an admirer is "what year is it?" ), but it also lets people see what the provincial license plate looked like in, say, 1957...

A Canadian Chrome Crossfolf Camera Presentation. :)